“This city in Bolivia's highlands has hired Aymara women dressed in traditional multilayered Andean skirts and brightly embroidered vests to work as traffic cops and bring order to its road chaos. About 20 of the “traffic cholitas” have been trained to direct cars and buses in El Alto, a teeming, impoverished sister city of La Paz in Bolivia's Andes mountains”. – El Alto via Associated Press. Photo: In this December 3, 2013 photo, an Aymara woman cops directs traffic on the streets of El Alto, Bolivia. The women wear the bright petticoats and shawls of indigenous women in the Andes, called cholitas in Bolivian slang, the main difference being that instead of bowler hats they wear khaki green police-style caps. Some don fluorescent traffic vests. (Photo by Juan Karita/AP Photo)

“When I was 8 years old, my parents paid a smuggler to take me across the Himalayas, a weekslong walk over the mountains from Tibet to India. It was a trek that tens of thousands of other Tibetans have taken since the Dalai Lama fled a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. My parents must have had their reasons to send me here; they must have had the best of intentions. But 18 years later, I still don't know why they did it. They are not political people. They are small farmers who raise barley and a few yak in a rural area not far from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. I have not seen them since I left...”. – Tsering Topgyal via The Associated Press. (Photo by Tsering Topgyal/AP Photo)

A black golden shaded British Shorthair cat is admired by visitors as he is carried at the Cat Extravaganza event at Olympia in London, Sunday, February 18, 2024. Loving Cats Worldwide brought its Cat Extravaganza and Rescue Awareness Event to London, where visitors could learn all about this intelligent species by observing the show's five judging rings. Plus, meet with local rescues and charities, as well as hear educational anecdotes about different cat breeds. (Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo)

The endangered antipodean albatross, which is often caught in fishing nets, won most first-choice votes out of the more than 55,000 votes cast during the 2020 New Zealand’s bird of the year competition. (Photo by Wildestanimal/Getty Images)

Takahiro Shito, 47, and his wife Sayomi Shito, 46, pray with their children Tomoka, 14, and Kenya 16, and their great uncle Akinori Takahashi, 76, as they pay respects to their daughter Chisato,12, buried in a nearby cemetery, victim of the Okowa Elementary School tragedy, who was killed during last year's tsunami on March 11, 2012 near Ishinomaki, Japan. Teachers at the school weren't trained for tsunami evacuation and didn't to lead the children up the snow covered mountain behind the school after the tsunami warning was sounded. Out of 108 students at the school, 74 died and four remain missing; 10 of the school's 13 teachers were also killed. (Photo by Daniel Berehulak /Getty Images)

An Iranian girl walks at the Tochal ski resort, in north of Tehran, Iran on December 12, 2019. (Photo by Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA via Reuters)

An adult specimen of Nannospalax (leucodon) montanosyrmiensis, a variant of the lesser mole-rat (Spalax leucodon) is pictured near Albertirsa, some 60 kilometers southeast of Budapest, Hungary, 12 May 2018. The critically endangered rodent lives in several isolated populations in the Carpathian Basin. (Photo by Sandor Ujvari/EPA/EFE)

Coast and marine winner: Storm Gull (Lesser black-backed gull), New Haven, East Sussex. (Photo by Craig Denford/British Wildlife Photography Awards)